Theme development problems (client side styles build failed)

[Samson Liu]

I need to develop a theme so the forum looks similar to our company's existing website.

I first cloned and was modifying the persona theme. Everything was working, but I kinda always hated working with bootstraps, and tracing back the classes and modifying the files was really exhausting for me.

So I tried starting from scratch. I forked the quickstart, and commented the import persona line in theme.less, and then I couldn't build nodebb. It always says "client side styles build failed"

Not even that, in the theme.less file, if I try to add my own styles either before or after the import persona line, it still says "client side styles build failed".

So what's the best way to build a new theme from scratch?

[Joey Washburn]

I am watching this closely. I cant figure this out either. Would you mind explaining what you mean by bootstrapping and tracing classes.

I think I am missing some steps. I copied the quickstart theme into node_modules and renamed all the files it says to.

Then I have been editing various tpl files, but nothing seems to change.